As a gamer all I knew was that Quake ran fast and Monster Truck Madness was framey as hell on my box. Thus I knew that OpenGL was good and Carmack was god and D3D was terrible.
The Tale of OpenGL vs. Direct3D
21–30 of 38 posts
Re: The Tale of OpenGL vs. Direct3D
#22Though well written, I think the article misses an important point. Microsoft designed Direct3D with games in mind and the culture surrounding OpenGL gave priority to productivity applications for engineering and design as is appropriate for something that was developed by Silicon Graphics. The characterization of Microsoft being disorganized because they were working on OpenGL at the same time as Direct3D is a direc…
This is a really good point. OpenGL favored precision, which could slow things down significantly. D3D favored speed at the expense of pixel-level precision. I remember my ATI driver having a slider that I could turn up and down the D3D precision.
Also missing in the article was the incredibly strong marketing efforts Microsoft made towards game developers. I was in the industry at the time (first at a game company, then a 3D modeling package company, then a 3D modeling company) and you couldn't turn around without getting hit in the face with something about D3D.
My undergraduate degree in CS came from the place that developed the tea pot that sat on the cover of the original OpenGL developer books. I really wanted to see OpenGL win, but between Microsoft exerting its unstoppable mid-90's force in that space and SGI drying up, I think everything could have gone right with the ARB and D3D still would have won.
Re: The Tale of OpenGL vs. Direct3D
#23As a gamer all I knew was that Quake ran fast and Monster Truck Madness was framey as hell on my box. Thus I knew that OpenGL was good and Carmack was god and D3D was terrible.
Carmack recently changed his opinion on D3D: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2011/03/11/carmack-direc...
Re: The Tale of OpenGL vs. Direct3D
#24The moderate experience I have with OpenGL confirms this explanation. However, it sort of misses the point. The author may be a bit too close to OpenGL to judge the relative significance of the all the historical details he knows. Take a step back: A) There's no way in hell Microsoft would allow OpenGL to take the lead from Direct3D on Windows and Xbox. They would wield the carrots and the sticks to prop up Direct3D…
Microsoft went down the D3D (well, the entire DirectX) path to court developers. They knew Windows95 could be much more successful if they could make it so developers could more easily write games for it. Developers were dying for reasonable abstraction layer on PC hardware. When 3D hardware became affordable, OpenGL continued its primary focus on perfection, which didn't give game developers what they needed (good enough, but FAST).
(Side note: If you ever want to pull your hair out, try going back in time to convert a DOS game written in X86 assembly using Mode X[0] blts that had been converted and tweaked from 68k assembly standing arcade game into a DirectX game a few months after DirectX is released for Windows95. Just figuring out how to convert the game time [which came from the sound card] into the DirectX world was unreal.)
Re: The Tale of OpenGL vs. Direct3D
#25Though well written, I think the article misses an important point. Microsoft designed Direct3D with games in mind and the culture surrounding OpenGL gave priority to productivity applications for engineering and design as is appropriate for something that was developed by Silicon Graphics. The characterization of Microsoft being disorganized because they were working on OpenGL at the same time as Direct3D is a direc…
Serious people don't care about games.
Re: The Tale of OpenGL vs. Direct3D
#26As if Glide never existed In all seriousness, I did 1 graphics programming course back in the day, and it was pretty insane. This was all in OpenGL. The amount of code required to draw the simplest scene was massive. I seem to remember there's a built-in teapot primitive, and I ended up just using that to construct everything (yes, there are simpler built-in primitives, but none nearly as cool as a teapot). I didn't…
My first 3D graphics course in college was the same story. You go in thinking you're going to learn to make "Crysis", and you're lucky to leave with a texture-mapped plane. In fact, we probably didn't write a line of code for the first month, we instead spent all our time deriving the mathematics involved in 3D graphics. As an analogy, it's like taking a "basics of the web" course, and instead of the expected lessons…
> As an analogy, it's like taking a "basics of the web" course, and instead of the expected lessons on HTML and CSS, you learn to write a web server and a web browser.
Funny you mention this - when I was an undergrad, the first complex group project in my EE/CE curriculum (second year; first year was all individual) had us building a web server.
Re: The Tale of OpenGL vs. Direct3D
#27As a complement, Chris Hecker has kept some of his notes regarding OpenGL vs. Direct3D around:
It seemed quite important at the time that he- who begat WinG, which begat DirectX, some of which is covered in Renegades of the Empire, which someone else mentioned, which is certainly worth reading- went on to agitate for OpenGL over Direct3D. Now there's kind of a scrapheap of history vibe off of the whole thing.
Re: The Tale of OpenGL vs. Direct3D
#28As if Glide never existed In all seriousness, I did 1 graphics programming course back in the day, and it was pretty insane. This was all in OpenGL. The amount of code required to draw the simplest scene was massive. I seem to remember there's a built-in teapot primitive, and I ended up just using that to construct everything (yes, there are simpler built-in primitives, but none nearly as cool as a teapot). I didn't…
The space of OpenGL programs that fail to produce anything visible onscreen is surprisingly vast.
This was my experience during my brief foray into graphics programming at uni. I remember failing a lot, thinking "this can't be me, somebody else somewhere is doing it wrong" and abandoning it in lieu of something more productive.
Re: The Tale of OpenGL vs. Direct3D
#29This is probably the most accurate view of the history of OpenGL vs. Direct3D I've seen on the internet. It goes into the actual implementation details of why OpenGL or D3D have been more or less popular for games\graphics programming over the years. Also follows my personal adoption of the APIs for projects pretty closely. Most other comparisons are too political or anti-MS, and are often written by people that have…
I don't know. If a historical account gives the details it knows correctly but leaves a bunch of details out is it still accurate? There's actually a great book written about the creation of Direct3D called Renegades of the Empire ( http://tinyurl.com/3n4jnru ). Having read that book I can tell you this account, while accurate in its technical details, misses a lot of other issues that were going on. For Instance...…
1. But how does that explain that Direct3D came out in Windows NT first? From what I remember the NT version was more advanced version released at that point (DX5 to 95's DX3) and they even managed to pack in a few games that took advantage of it (Pinball stands out). By my accounts it looked like Microsoft was using NT to position Direct3d with poor OGL thrown in for those too stubborn to move.
2. I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. OGL was a bear to program for. Microsoft wrote an easier API but it didn't get good until much later. If anything the OGL group should have seen this coming and done something about it. Instead they chose to ignore it at their own peril. Those other OSes were effectively dead by this point MS didn't need to move developers anywhere they were already captured.
3. Agreed. Even now there is no API like it except SDL, and even SDL is very very limited.
4. Agreed.
OpenGL collapsed due to a lot of things. The primary reason was the group itself. And this is the thing that anti-MS people ignore.
Re: The Tale of OpenGL vs. Direct3D
#30Another thing that isn't exactly helping OpenGL is Apple's slow creeping adoption of recent versions. I'm running the latest Snow Leopard and my code is reporting OpenGL 2.1.
I'm not really blaming Apple. I mean, on top of the core version they've implemented about 100 extensions with names like GL_ATI_separate_stencil, GL_NV_fragment_program2, GL_ARB_instanced_arrays, etc.. But the OpenGL 4.1 specs were released a year ago and I've got 3D code that runs significantly faster when I boot into Windows. Exact same hardware, but it's OpenGL 2.1 (+ extensions) vs. Direct3D 9.